Is a Yellow Wall emerging?

The media is obsessed with presenting events as dramatic and unprecedented, therefore it reported on the weakening of Labour’s hold on industrial heartland seats with alacrity. You’ve probably seen the phrase ‘Red Wall’ in print a thousand times since the 2019 General Election. Two years on and it has a generals-fighting-the-previous-battle quality to it. All walls can fall down and we’re now seeing the cracks in the Southern Blue Wall that Lib Dems were hoping in vain to chip away at in 2019. No one ever talks about a Yellow Wall because our Westminster power base isn’t substantial enough to represent a heartland, we have a cluster in SW London, that’s it.
In my previous blog about Lib Dem local election success in the countryside I mentioned the jam doughnuts around university towns, now in the Thames Valley, Cotswolds and Avon hinterland we have more of a family-sized lasagne dish emerging. The Oxfordshire halo spreading out from the county town nearly merges with the block of Gloucestershire Lib Dem-held county divisions, which in turn is connected to a number of councils in Somerset we gained in 2019. Now it’s possible to ramble from the Monmouthshire-Herefordshire border in an Easterly direction and walk 150 miles through 95% Lib/Lab/Independent county council divisions until you’re within sight of London on the Southern flank of the Chilterns. This area might not be solidly Lib Dem when it comes to Westminster elections but it’s certainly more than a cluster, taking in Somerset, NW Wilts, Gloucestershire, parts of Hereford and most of southern Oxfordshire.

Our strength in the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire hinterlands means two large clusters are close to merging. Image courtesy of Ben Walker/Britain Elects and the New Statesman

There has been plenty of commentary about the centre of gravity shifting for the party, away from our traditional SW England homeland and more towards the SE of England. Certainly opportunities now abound in Surrey, Sussex, Bucks and Herts – things are tough for us in Cornwall and I don’t really have an answer as to how we turn things around in the land of my fathers (my surname is Cornish for hilltop). Recent success in Oxfordshire, Shropshire and Gloucestershire suggests to me we’re not limited to the London home counties commuter-belt that certain pundits say we are.

Welcome success in Somerset in the 2019 Local Elections

The various clusters that have grown to the point where they connect on the Local Elections map – a new Thames/Severn/Avon Valley heartland – how much does it matter that they form a wall? Certainly at the most basic level if you can win in a wide geographical area it’s more durable than one small area, or outpost of support. You win in one area, make it safe, then send your activists next door to win in a social-economically similar place. It’s no coincidence that we won St Albans in the last General Election then picked up Chesham & Amersham 20 miles away, this would’ve been much more difficult if the nearest Lib Dem seat was 50+ miles away in terms of mobilising support and convincing locals it was possible. While most people aren’t focussed on politics most of the time, at street level the general public see multiple amber diamond stakeboards up in your constituency, that creates visibility for hundreds driving through who live in the neighbouring seat.
If the Lib Dems centre of gravity is really shifting East is this a problem? Some are uncomfortable at us being portrayed as the party of leafy suburbia, spa towns, university towns and heritage towns. I’d say this is only a problem if the party’s success is so lop-sided towards affluent areas there was mission creep in our policy platform and we became less progressive. Also we have to start somewhere – in the 80’s it was breaking out of our Scots/Welsh/Cornish Celtic fringe to win in every region and nearly every major city of mainland Britain. Anyway, here’s hoping in the next few years we’re not just knocking down other people’s walls but putting up a few of our own.

A bit of theatre to go with history – the Chesham & Amersham byelection was our first win in Buckinghamshire in 100 years

This blog originally appeared on the Liberal England blog roll which can be found here:

http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/

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Twitter: @lordbonkers

It’s Property, stupid – why it matters so much

Imagine if you only needed to look at one simple metric in order to make sense of the confusion and chaos of British politics. One simple indicator points you in the direction of who’s going to win the next election. In World War II Soviet Generals famously simplified their battle plans by paying attention to one thing, and one thing only – the temperature outside. Once the mercury dropped below -18ºc they knew they were in business – that’s the temperature at which diesel freezes, they had contingency plans to keep their T-34 tanks working in ultra-low temps (light a fire under the tank and toast it for two hours), and the Nazis didn’t. It was the harsh Russian winters that kept the Germans from storming Moscow, and the Soviet top brass knew it.
This simplification strategy brings us to this week’s topic, something which I contend is crucial to voting intention in the UK, especially England, but receives surprisingly little coverage relative to its importance – the Property Market. Here you can see one of my all-time favourite election maps, it’s from the 1995 Local Elections, you’ll notice plenty of Red across the North and Midlands, a fantastic sweep of Amber across the South and hardly any Blue on the map at all.

Local Elections 1995 – one of the worst nationwide results for the Conservatives in history

What happened in the run up to these elections which meant they were such a disaster for the ruling Conservative Government? To my mind, Margaret Thatcher sold people two big ownership dreams in the 1980s – shares and houses. We discovered over time that they weren’t that interested in shares, and the home owning dream had turned sour by 1995. Repeated privatisations showed us the general public was far more focussed on earning a quick buck – they sold their shares within a few hours – than making long term investments, raking in dividends and maximising profits by selling up later on. Owning property had turned into a genuine bear trap for millions by 1995, even if they’d bought a heavily discounted Council Home, property ownership was painful. The housing market crashed, and crashed hard during the second half of 1989, so much so that prices didn’t return to that level in real terms until 2002. I still hear stories of people needing to sell a house in the early ‘90s and making 33% or more loss on the sale. Paying a mortgage was a genuine stretch with base interest rates jacked up to 15% and staying above 10% for years afterwards – the property owning dream turned into a nightmare for most. Let’s not forget that mortgaged ownership was a relatively new and novel concept in the 1980s, at the start of the decade 42% of UK housing stock was council-owned, now it’s only 8%. By 1995 many people had spent the last few years worrying about their jobs through the early-90s recession and then simply working to pay off their mortgage. For the least fortunate, the sums didn’t add up – 345,000 homes were repossessed between 1990 and 1995.
Young people nowadays talk of the housing market being broken, you can’t afford a starter home until you’re 40 and you’re ripped off by private rents as soon as you leave the family nest. Back in 1995 the housing market was broken too, but the sense of loss aligned to negative equity, and the stress of making mortgage payments fed into far greater voter dissatisfaction.

The ’90s slump – house prices fell for six years, only returning to 1989 prices in the 21st century

It’s often said that the seeds of defeat are sowed in moments of triumph. For New Labour, its approach to property and housing weigh as a millstone. Blair and Brown absorbed the property-owning dream into their platform and courted home owners en masse, successfully, for the first time. Low mortgage rates, making repayments lower than private rents, and rising property values are understandably popular with voters. Labour pursued this to achieve a tipping point with Middle England. It worked, but combined with a refusal to build council housing and continue on with Right to Buy, Labour stoked dysfunction in the property market that exists to this day, and works against them electorally.
Put simply, the apparent zero jeopardy aspect of home ownership in 2021 – ever rising prices and low interest rates that go on forever has created a huge and resilient block of Conservative voters. If you ever scratch your head and wonder how the baseline polling level for the Tories is, say 38%, despite terrible mishandling of the pandemic, deteriorating NHS, flat lining school exam results, rising crime and mediocre local amenities – cuts to bus services, libraries and leisure centres – look no further than the 0.1% BoE base rate and the eye-popping prices in your local estate agents (my local 50-unit shopping centre currently has three estate agents). Millions feel awfully good about their asset wealth, sitting on an asset rising by £20,000 – £25,000 a year without having to even think about it, let alone invest in a make over.

Who’d be a renter now? With virtually no new Council Homes, and wages to prices ratios making ownership a distant dream, the property market is rigged hugely against the young

Can the Conservatives ever be beaten if they’re seen as the party of property? As I mentioned before the property market is still highly dysfunctional and there’s a ride-it-until-the-wheels-come-off quality to what the current government is doing. If there’s a housing market crash as severe as in 1989 they’re finished, and they’re finished for several elections in a row. This is why they’re happy to sink Billions into schemes such as Help to Buy, have a Stamp Duty holiday and preside over a huge transfer of money to private landlords in the form of Housing Benefit instead of funding new Council Housing. Stoke house prices, then keep them afloat by any means necessary. It either ends with a bang, which at the moment few are predicting, so is likely to happen in ways mainstream economists don’t understand yet, or with a whimper. Home ownership is declining gently and private renting is on the increase. House prices are around 7.5 times earnings in England and 12.5 times earnings in London, instead of the long term post-war average of 3.5 times earnings. The mortgage market may have adjusted to this but ultimately it means the home ownership dream will not be shared out to an ever-widening audience down the income deciles and the sub-prime fiasco shows you shouldn’t even try to do that.
If there’s no property crash between now and, say 2030, the Tories will only be turfed out by a Revenge of the Renters. Private renters have every right to feel pretty mad at the government, having to put up with mediocre housing in a seller’s market where it costs 46% of average pre-tax pay to rent a one-bedroom flat/house in London and 23% in the rest of England. This compares with approximately 5% back in the 1960s. Much like the mortgage payers of the early-90s, millennials and Gen Z renters are working simply to put a roof over their head and pay utility bills. It’s only a matter of time before their voice is heard at the ballot box, but when and by how much?

Reflections on the by-elections

If like me you’re a huge elections nerd you’ll be familiar with various terms used across the world in election coverage, from the US we hear bellwether, lean, tossup, and if you’re a tragic obsessive you learn about the elasticity of various states. In certain parts of the country the Democrat/Republican voter blocks don’t change much, if any shift happens it will take place over the course of a generation, not a single election. In the week since polling day what’s struck me about Batley and Spen is that it’s a particularly inelastic constituency when it comes to the Labour/Conservative voting blocks. Since Labour won this seat in 1997, outside of the 2016 by-election its peak majority has been 8,961, with a long-term average in the 5,000 – 6,000 range.
If there’s been a change in the election landscape of this seat it’s the presence of a major third party vote, in 2019 this was 6,432 for the Heavy Woollen District Independents, and last week it was 8,264 for the Workers Party – not far off the 8,800 disenfranchised HWDI, Brexit and Green Party voters I mentioned in my last blog.

Batley Variety Club – ambitious and eyecatching

If I’m being unkind Labour and Conservatives ran equally mediocre campaigns and it ended in a messy inelastic stalemate. Labour will be happy enough to retain this seat, however, as there are three major headwinds it had to overcome. Firstly, this seat, which encompasses two mid-sized towns, has a fair bit of rural hinterland attached to it. Labour tends to struggle in the countryside, even in the North. Secondly, by all accounts Kirklees Borough Council is not popular with local residents, it’s flitted between Labour control and NOC since 1979 so any locally-focussed protest vote would be against Labour. Thirdly, there are genuine pockets of prosperity in the area – the most conspicuous manifestation of this being the Batley Variety Club, which was a major part of the UK’s entertainment landscape (some called it the Vegas of the North). The Variety Club opened in 1967 and operated in various different forms until 2016. Big name performers at the club included Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison, Eartha Kitt and Shirley Bassey. Bassey, who stayed with the club’s owners during long residency stints, once caused a stir by going to the local chip shop dressed in full evening wear conveyed by a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.
I’d like to congratulate Kim Leadbeater on her victory and staying the course during a campaign that turned nasty at street level and to our own Tom Gordon who fought a dignified campaign touching on quality of life issues you’d hope and expect a Lib Dem to.

They didn’t see Elvis, but Shirley Bassey did visit their chip shop

Chesham & Amersham

Weeellllllll what can you say about this result? The Conservatives weren’t just taken to the cleaners, they had their washing done, tumble dried, ironed, folded up and handed back to them – that’s how much they were taken to the cleaners. Often when the Lib Dems win, people love to pick holes – it’s just a protest vote, it’s niche – you only win in university towns/heritage towns/spa towns. That kind of criticism can’t be levelled at Chesham & Amersham, it has a character and a set of demographics that apply to dozens of other seats across the South. If it happened in Chesham & Amersham it could happen in Surrey Heath, Woking, Tunbridge Wells, Wantage, Wokingham, Hitchin & Harpenden and a host of other places we’ve never won in a General Election before.
What are the significant conclusions you can draw from the campaign? It’s a blessed relief to see that most people aren’t that focussed on national opinion polls when the full intensity of a by-election is playing out right on their doorstep. Several hundred activists swarmed this seat who are supremely battle-hardened and they were joined by a cohort of Young Liberals making their canvassing debuts. The importance of this cannot be downplayed. To my mind the Lib Dems rode a wave in the 2017 – 2019 where our membership reached record levels, sad to say, however that many who left soon after the 2019 General Election were LINOs (Liberal in Name Only) – Europhiles who joined to stop Brexit but were relatively apathetic about all our other causes – mental health, carers’ rights, the pink tax, the environment, abolishing Business Rates, pro-overseas aid, defending refugees and asylum seekers etc. Those who have joined the party since the last election can’t possibly have the same Brexit monomania and have a more wholehearted approach to our overall platform. If the Lib Dems are to have a future we need a bedrock of members who buy into Bentham, Mill, Keynes and Beveridge – the whole philosophical shooting match – rather than people fired up by events – whether that’s the Iraq War or Brexit. Chesham and Amersham may prove to be a rebirth for the party – it wasn’t just that we won, it’s who helped us win that represents a whole new chapter.
A lot of the commentary about recent by-elections has been about a Progressive Alliance, I feel Labour’s approach to Chesham & Amersham was more reminiscent of the Blair/Ashdown tactical voting symbiosis. Labour deliberately chose a candidate who was a terrible fit for the constituency – not local, not high profile and a keen Trades Unionist (this isn’t a criticism of Natasa Pantelic, who may make a fantastic MP in the future, it just won’t be in the affluent rural home counties). The Conservatives also chose a dreadful candidate, but I don’t think that was on purpose. Keir Starmer also played his part by pretending to forget his candidate’s name in a TV interview – which was a roundabout way of saying the seat wasn’t a Labour priority. Draw your own conclusions.

Sarah Green and Ed Davey – Sarah Green hit the ground running by meeting the River Chess Association about preserving the rare chalk stream a day after being elected

Hartlepool

The Hartlepool by-election was a while ago but I thought I’d touch on it briefly. The result was welcomed by Conservatives and the Labour left as further evidence of the disappearance of the Red Wall and a verdict on Labour’s current leadership. A bit like Batley and Spen, Hartlepool has a political micro-climate and quite frankly a maverick political culture. Let’s not forget this town voted the local football club’s Monkey-suit mascot in as Mayor despite not attending any of the hustings or publishing a manifesto (cue 11 years of competent local government by Stuart Drummond until his post was abolished). In more recent times Hartlepool has been the most fertile ground for a combination of obscure far-right parties who have made little headway, even at ward level, anywhere else in the UK. I’d really like to believe that the local election results below are not a sign that racism is widely acceptable in the town, but it certainly is worrying and a sure sign of a dysfunctional relationship between mainstream politics and the people in smaller ‘left behind’ towns in the North.

Individual ward results from Hartlepool’s local elections in 2019 – IU is Independent Union, founded by ex-UKIPers, the Veterans and People’s Cllr Lee Cartwright briefly defected to the Brexit Party in 2020